Thanksgiving Eve

* Bill Simmon has links on how to argue with your relatives about climate change over Thanksgiving. (If you have a smartphone, just queue up How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic and wait.) As I wrote over at Bill’s place, Matt Taibi’s recent piece on Sarah Palin—describing how she uses her endless interpersonal conflicts to generate political capital that is totally independent of anything so mundane as “ideas” or “positions”—really opened my eyes on how this Climategate nonsense is doing its work. Climategate shifts the field of debate from statistics and facts, which only a small minority are qualified to discuss, to the field of interpersonal relations and “bad behavior,” on which we can all have an opinion. It’s being pushed as a “huge scandal” precisely because it remakes climate change into a moral question about how smart people sometimes turn out to be arrogant jerks. That this moral question is totally irrelevant to the facts isn’t a bug, it’s the whole point.

3 Responses

I’d like to see more than some off-the-cuff remarks before deciding a Shining sequel is a terrible idea. True, King doesn’t have the best track record when returning to this story, but it is his book. I’d rather he wrote a sequel than somebody else.

[…] would clamp down on the CRU hack and refuse to let go. I am, perhaps, naive, but I had thought the simple distinction between scientific claims and moral evaluations would be enough to return the discussion to rational, factual […]